Mobile communication devices are increasingly used for far more than telephone calls. Over recent years in particular, mobile communication devices have been provided with a larger and larger range of functionality. Organisations are under pressure to utilise this functionality to communicate with potential customers, i.e. the users of mobile communication devices.
For example, mobile communication devices increasingly provide access to the internet. An organisation which has an internet presence, such as a website, is therefore able to communicate with users of mobile communication devices through the internet. Advantageously, many organisations have existing websites, meaning that it is not necessary for them to expend resources to communicate with their customers in this way.
However, access to the internet on mobile communication devices can be cumbersome. The connection to the internet on a mobile communication device is typically relatively slow compared to fixed connections, and the compact nature of mobile communication devices can lead to difficulty in manipulating web pages designed for home or laptop computers. Moreover, mobile communication devices are often simply unable to display some web-based content, such as that created in Adobe Flash.
In order to overcome these difficulties, an organisation may wish to offer a mobile version of its website. A mobile version of a website is optimised for display on a mobile communication device. For example, large images in the original website may be removed and the layout of the website may be optimised for mobile viewing. In this way, it is possible to overcome some of the problems of viewing the internet on a mobile communication device. However, for full optimisation different mobile versions of a web site would have to be created for the differing capabilities of each mobile communication device.
One way in which mobile versions of websites can be created is through a “transcoding” service. Transcoding services automatically convert conventional web sites into mobile versions suitable for viewing on a mobile communication device. In some cases, transcoding services run “on-the-fly” (i.e. as content is downloaded), meaning that it is possible to optimise the result according to the requirements of the mobile communication device requesting the content.
Transcoding services allow organisations to provide a wide range of content to customers who use appropriate mobile communication devices. However, there are limits to the functionality of such services. In particular, although the service may remove and rearrange elements of the website, the website was fundamentally designed for viewing in its original state. That is to say, the website was not designed for viewing or manipulation on a mobile communication device.
Moreover, websites, whether transcoded or not, do not necessarily make use of all the capabilities of the mobile communication device. That is to say, while they may provide content to users, they do not allow organisations to utilise the full capabilities of the mobile communication device when communicating with their customers.
One way in which an organisation may harness the capabilities of mobile communication devices is to provide a software application that can be loaded on to the device. Users of mobile communication devices may typically download such software applications from an “application store” accessible from their mobile communication device. This allows users to customise the functions they wish to have available on their mobile communication device, and also allows the organisation which provides the software application to utilise the hardware abilities of the mobile communication device in a manner which was previously the sole preserve of the manufacturer of the mobile communication device. An increasing proportion of mobile communication devices sold today are so-called “smart phones” in which the ability to download software applications is seamlessly integrated.
One advantage of such applications is that they are designed for the mobile communication device on which they function. This allows the user interface of the applications to be designed with the mobile communication device in mind. For example, if the mobile communication device has a touch screen the user interface may comprise large icons for selection by the user. In this way, a user may access information easily.
However, these developments bring their own complications. For example, there are a range of mobile communication devices available, and typically an application written for one mobile communication device will not function on another. As such, an organisation must provide separate versions of the application for each mobile communication device, or at least for each operating system running on the available mobile communication devices. This is a burden and creates a barrier to entry into the marketplace.
This barrier to entry is especially acute for organisations whose core business is not information technology, since the expertise to program an application for a single type of mobile communication device, let alone for many types, may not be available. Larger companies or corporations may be able to overcome this barrier by employing contractors to create applications for them, but this may be prohibitively expensive for small and medium sized enterprises.
As a result, while a wide range of organisations are able to communicate with users of mobile communication devices through the internet, a smaller proportion of organisations are able to harness the full capabilities of such devices. It would be beneficial to both users of mobile communication devices and the organisations themselves if more organisations were able to access these capabilities.